Increasing Complexity of Semiconductor Manufacturing—The transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Telephone Laboratories by a team led by physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Almost every piece of equipment that stores, transmits, displays, or manipulates information in the sixty years hence has at its core silicon chips filled with electronic circuitry. These chips have dramatically scaled to many millions of transistors and miles of interconnect. A global network of independent but cooperative entities and technologists has provided this solution by specialization and business process integration.
Over the years market opportunities have created niches for deep competencies to profitably support analog and digital designers with tools including time domain and frequency domain analysis, multiple levels of abstraction from physical layout to behavioral specification, and supporting infrastructure such as test, measurement, and failure analysis. Every step in the complex manufacturing process has evolved to improve quality and productivity in dramatic acceleration and volume. Procedures that were once handcrafted have become automated. Designs that were once uniquely customized have become standard components which plug and play within larger systems. Tools which were islands of automation now fit with design flows.
Continuous improvement in product quality and manufacturing efficiency has been driven by adopting new materials and new ways to work. To achieve density more information and control over the semiconductor material and processes need to be measured, understood, and managed within each discipline. And to obtain overall success and timeliness, better communication has been extended upstream and downstream in the tool chains and the supply and design organizations.
Electronic Product Definition Design and Test Database—For every product brought to market there is a virtual electronic product definition design and test database which may not exist in any one place or time but reflects all the steps by every contributor.
Simple tool files optimized for function—Originally there were and in some specialized domains still are tools built for a single purpose which have a simple file optimized to the function needed by the owner/user. These user/developers change the files whenever they need to enhance their tool or correct bugs.
Translation between proprietary files to exchange data—As an electronic product moves from one level of abstraction to a more realized level, it has been convenient to translate from one proprietary file format to another. Very successful tools have become de jure standards because other toolmakers pragmatically adapt to what their customers have adopted. Standards bodies sometimes adopt or extend the file formats which are most popular. In other cases a compromise between multiple camps and experts is negotiated under some voting process. An example of a file format used to exchange information from one tool to another which has become both standard and open is LEF/DEF the library exchange format/design exchange format.
Integration within larger vendors to multi-use binary databases with API—But file formats are slow to change to accommodate new requirements and may be slow to read or write. Within a tool vendor which has acquired or developed a suite of tools, it is compelling to maintain information common to a number of products within a single data format and define application programming interfaces (APIs) to their teams of toolmakers. Integrating and selling their own downstream tool is thus generally less challenging than translating a file from or to a competing vendor's format. Performance within a tool and across multiple tools is improved by using an API rather than writing or reading an external file.
Open standards in files, databases, and API's—Some customers and smaller tool vendors advocate an open standard binary database with an independently defined API rather than waiting for a larger tool vendor to accommodate their needs. As new requirements and materials emerge from the laboratory however, there will continue to be some mix of de facto and de jure standards in file format, binary databases, and API's to describe an electronic product and capture all the data related to its manufacturing, test, and analysis.
Failure Analysis Across Disciplines and Entities: Test, Physical Layout, and Design.
An important function for improving reliability, quality, cost, and productivity is failure analysis. Failure analysis is by its nature cross disciplinary because the source of the failure is to be discovered. Failure analysis requires access to and integration of information created by or used for test, physical layout, and the original design team among others. Failure analysis is costly and must be applied to the most compelling issues facing an entity whether it be customer satisfaction, cost, or productivity.
Multi customer foundry and IP owners—It can be appreciated by those knowledgeable in the art that a failure analysis engineer who is an employee of a vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturer, working at a foundry owned by the vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturer, and co-located with product engineers and design engineers with access to tools sold by leading electronic design automation vendors may conceptually, have full access, but pragmatically, suffer little or no access to the entire test, layout, and design databases; and today must request help from his colleagues in navigating through the file system to narrow his analysis candidates. Even enabled via corporate access control policies, the foundry engineer may not be familiar with the design files—it is not information that his job function is familiar with. The Foundry engineer is interested in the X-Y location, metal layer, process step, or mask layer—not the information provided by many design files (gates, nets, flip-flops, etc.).
While there remain vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturers and computer manufacturers, it is common to find a complex supply chain that supports semiconductor manufacturing with fabrication, test, packaging, and distribution services. Any member of the supply chain may presently have customers who compete with one another and whose alliances will change over time. Some of the members of the supply chain may become a competitor to a former customer or even compete with their customer while remaining a supplier. Failure analysis can be performed at a number of points in the supply chain. A foundry in the Far East may prefer to perform failure analysis while the lots are still in the manufacturing area without disturbing its customer or waiting for information from half the world away on a different holiday or vacation schedule. Yet the owner of the semiconductor IP has valid business and technical reasons inhibiting the transfer of the entire test, manufacturing, and design database necessary to perform a failure analysis. Even if agreeable in spirit such a transfer may introduce delay to learn the motivation which simply could be an embarrassing error which is culturally unacceptable. Furthermore, transferring terabytes of data to analyze is itself punishing to all concerned.
Electronic databases for integrated circuits are now very large and are difficult to send entirely. Furthermore, some steps of the manufacturing process are economically performed globally and through supplier-vendor relationships. Some semiconductor IP owners may not consider it prudent to transfer an entire database of design files to a business partner who may be a present or future competitor or who serves or will serve competitors. It is certainly not convenient for either party. Yet improvements in yield benefit all parties and the delay in resolving problems are costly.
Thus it can be appreciated that what is needed is a way to provide only the information that a failure analysis engineer needs to identify the source of a problem in manufacturing or design, by extracting relevant data from an Electronic Product Definition Design and Test Database which may exist as an ad hoc combination of files and databases in many formats and may further contain semiconductor intellectual property which the owner wishes protected as a trade secret with minimal intervention of the product or design teams.